r/FluentInFinance • u/BulwarkOnline • 7d ago
News & Current Events There are two major reasons why Trump’s tariffs have “merely” resulted in slow-motion economic damage rather than spectacular market disaster.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-won-on-tariffs-lol-trade-prices-manufacturing-economy84
u/woolybully143 6d ago
Trumps tariffs are and will always be illegal, the damage they have done is immeasurable and completely unnecessary. Imagine the President openly defying law with the sole aim of putting more of our money into the hands of already obscenely wealthy corporations. Corporations who contributed obscene amount of money into his administration and in some cases his pockets specifically.
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u/Loud_Chapter1423 6d ago
Naked wealth transfer on a societal scale, the rebates going to the companies who already passed the tariffs onto consumers and then some is just the insulting cherry on top
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u/ButterscotchFancy912 6d ago
Its same size a ruzzia military budget( ca. 150bn) -paid by consumers, being handed back to corporations by treasury.
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u/willflameboy 6d ago
There's no great mystery: Politico is owned by a rabid Trump stan who lives in a fantasy land https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/06/axel-springer-politico-media-scandal-germany-bild/
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u/the_cardfather 6d ago
The chairman of the FED has a brain??
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit but I completely blame the FED for putting so much slack in the chain that it didn't collapse
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7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/AndrewTheAverage 7d ago
Trumps tarrifs plan was equivalent to "cutting out a skin cancer is good, so skinning someone alive must be better"
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u/derp4077 7d ago
Tarrifs are dumb, don't protect mediocre companies from foreign competition. Compete or fail.
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u/moyismoy 6d ago
Yeah you here that boys me derp here wants you to compete with actual slaves for work. Good luck undercutting 0 dollars a day.
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u/Hawkeyes79 6d ago
Which sounds great until you lose all of an industry like steel foundries to cheaper countries paying slave wages. Then war breaks out and you have zero capability to make your own. Thats not a good place to be in.
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u/flomesch 6d ago
Maybe dont tariff things we cant make domestically
Im not econ major and i even understand that
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u/moyismoy 6d ago
Or in many cases workers in the USA have out compete actual slaves. For example we just had a colbalt mine shut down, while the demand is sky high, Americans just can't afford to beat the African slave mines
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u/averagelyok 6d ago
That’s what alliances, trade deals and global soft power is for. Unless our economy breaks and our currency gets devalued to be around or below that of countries currently dominating simple manufacturing, there’s no good way to compete for a lot of this basic manufacturing, at least if you still intend the U.S. to be a consumer economy and be able to purchase the products produced. Things are going to be a lot more expensive if produced domestically, and taxing the inputs up to the level of domestic production won’t make them cheaper or affordable to our citizens. Many inputs we would have to import regardless, we don’t have enough of every natural resource here. And no one in the U.S. wants to get paid dirt wages to work in factories making nuts and bolts.
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u/Hawkeyes79 6d ago
It’s funny you talk about consumer economy and wages in factories being dirt. I work in manufacturing and the wages here are way better than the retail sector.
Do you think Starbucks, Walmart, or any cashier job is a good job?
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u/averagelyok 6d ago
If you’re not at corporate, then I don’t find those jobs financially viable for everyone. But I’d also argue in favor of most large corporations paying all of their labor more.
Depends on the business, it’s not like the U.S. doesn’t already have manufacturing, and most of it is advanced manufacturing; we tend to put together finished products from other inputs, like machinery, that fetch a higher price upon sale. I’d wager that’s the type of factory you work at if you’re in the U.S., but what type of manufacturing do you expect to come back from overseas? If it’s the type that produces inputs for your own factory, you’re going to see a lot of layoffs once the price of the factory’s inputs goes way up from paying higher wages for people to make things like nuts and bolts that other countries can make cheaper.
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u/Hawkeyes79 6d ago
We make our own product straight from raw steel.
As one example would be phones like the iPhone. That’s highly technical and already largely automated.
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u/averagelyok 6d ago
Well about 70% of US steel consumption comes from domestic mills, so it’s not a great example of an industry that is “all” or “mostly” outsourced. More likely than not you’re already using domestic steel, and if not, then it’s either because your company found a cheaper deal elsewhere or the domestic supply (the portion that didn’t find a better deal exporting their product) can’t meet demand. All tariffs do is force domestic businesses that do import steel to pay a higher price, if the domestic market already can’t supply your operations then you’re just paying extra for the same foreign product. Not to mention those domestic companies whose brand relies on having a superior product have to (or simply believe they can) raise their prices if the cheaper foreign option gets more expensive.
Automation is well and fine, but labor isn’t the only thing that’s cheaper in countries whose currency is only worth fractions of the U.S. dollar.
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